Ogg Theora In Firefox, With Wikimedia Support 339
An anonymous reader writes "Ogg Theora support for the HTML5 <video> tag is in the Firefox 3.1 nightlies. Theora is the only video format allowed on Wikimedia Commons, so Wikimedia people are pushing Wikipedia readers to download a nightly and try it out. Break it, crash it, report bugs, get it into good shape and nullify Apple and Nokia's FUD the best way possible. They may have gotten the words 'Vorbis' and 'Theora' removed from the HTML5 spec, but the market will tell them when their browsers are sucking."
Vorbis is alright, but Theora is the suck (Score:0, Informative)
You should see the doom9.org results of Theora. It's like... watching 1990s RealMedia clips or MPEG-1.
Ugh (Score:0, Informative)
I hate to burst your guys bubble but Theora is a pretty lousy codec. This isn't like Vorbis which holds its own. I have no interest in it at all.
Now Dirac / "That guy with a cat who's name I can't spell" I'd be interested in.
amount of content (Score:3, Informative)
Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:5, Informative)
I've put more Theora videos on Wikipedia commons than almost anyone else. The problem is, ffmpeg2theroa [v2v.cc] (which is the most direct way of generating theora videos, by transcoding them from other video formats) is not all that great. I've tried to get three features included in ffmpeg2theora with no success at all. The developers don't have bugzilla and don't respond to email. (For anyone interested, those three features are: [1] a command line option to use whatever resolution the target video uses rather than manually specifying it [2] the ability to rotate by 90 degrees, and [3] because many cameras (including mine) tend to set a couple of bits wrong when creating quicktime movies, ffmpeg2theora need to be less picky about following certain file specifications. Right now, it errors out without producing any output)
So yes, this is good news. But until there's more content to actually view using this - and that necessitates better production-side software - it's not all that big of a deal.
Re:Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:1, Informative)
Well, use VLC media player, that can do 1, 2, and 3.
ogg is already used in games... (Score:4, Informative)
... because it's patent-free. Quite a few games I see have vorbis.dll and therora.dll's about.
Re:Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:5, Informative)
ffmpeg does support conversion to ogg theora. The problem is that (a) ffmpeg is Linux only, which means that it won't serve any more than a niche audience for the purposes of putting content on Wikimedia commons, and (b) ffmpeg is an 800 pound gorilla. Trying to read through its man page to figure out the correct options to output to theora is *painful* (on the occasions I've used it, I had much more success simply googling for the right command)
Untrue (Score:1, Informative)
From Wikipedia:
"MPEG-4 contains patented technologies that require licensing in countries that acknowledge software patents. Patents covering MPEG-4 are claimed by over two dozen companies. The MPEG Licensing Authority[1] licenses patents required for MPEG-4 Part 2 Visual from a wide range of companies (audio is licensed separately) and lists all of its licensors and licensees on the site. New licenses for MPEG-4 System patents are under development[2] and no new licenses are being offered while holders of its old MPEG-4 Systems license are still covered under the terms of that license for the patents listed (MPEG LA â" Patent List).
AT&T is trying to sue companies such as Apple Inc. over alleged MPEG-4 patent infringement.[3] The terms of Apple's Quicktime 7 license for users[citation needed] describes in paragraph 14 the terms under Apple's existing MPEG-4 System Patent Portfolio license from MPEGLA."
Ahh.. the fairness of slashdot. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:3, Informative)
No, it isn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffmpeg [wikipedia.org]
Re:MEncoder can do all that (Score:4, Informative)
After some time spent googling and figuring out how to use Mencoder and Ffmpeg to do the rotation and theora transcoding, I wrote a Python script [udel.edu] to do the heavy lifting. So that takes care of my problem, but that won't work for 99.9% of people who have this problem.
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Informative)
Ogg Vorbis is an awesome music codec, producing smaller files than MP3 for the same level of quality. Ogg Theora is a rather mediocre-to-poor video codec, producing larger files than most alternatives (MPEG4, for instance) for the same level of quality. To top it off, it also taxes the CPU more than alternatives, which is still important for really high bitrate videos. Given the current level of quality of the Theora codec, it wouldn't make any sense for YouTube to switch to it for its videos, even if YouTube had the desire to do so.
Re:Words (Score:4, Informative)
.
Blipverts, anyone?
Re:That is nice (Score:1, Informative)
That is one of the side-effects on nspluginwrapper for linux. While its main use is for running 32 bit binary plugins on 64 bit, even on 32 bit it has the advantage of shielding firefox from crashes of wrapped plugins.
Re:That is nice (Score:4, Informative)
Those of us on x86-64 already have this, because Adobe doesn't feel a 64-bit flash is important and we have to run 32-bit Flash via nspluginwrapper. When flash crashes for me all that happens is that any flash objects on open web pages disappear and turn into empty white squares. I just hit reload and it starts up flash again.
The truth is the parent post is full of lies. (Score:5, Informative)
When I was evaluating codecs for an embedded platform H.264 consumed three times the MIPS of the Theora decoder, on our target CPU architecture.
H.264 did win out on quality, but the licensing was very expensive... almost as costly as our whole CPU. The cpu load would have required us to add an expensive decoding chip. Because of those negatives H.264 was simply a non-starter.
Fortunately our application didn't require interworking with the outside world so Theora was a good fit. At the low bitrates we needed Theora's quality was far above our other options (MPEG1, for example) and reasonable enough.
As Theora adoption increases we can expect the pace of increase to increase. For many people the objective balance is already in favour of Theora but for most applications compatibility dwarfs all other factors. Few care about 10% differences in bitrate, and free has a huge advantage over the long term in terms of archiving ubiquity.
Re:YouTube (Score:2, Informative)
Why couldn't YouTube support both formats? GameTrailers [gametrailers.com] does something like this - I know off hand that it supports QuickTime, WMV, and Flash (and another I think, but I'm not positive on that). I believe that it auto-detects which one is best given your OS, browser, and what is available. For example, I generally visit the site on my MacBook in Firefox, so I generally get the Quicktime version. Sometimes I get the streaming one instead (I assume because either the Quicktime version isn't available, or I only get Quicktime when streaming isn't available).
It shouldn't be that hard for YouTube to do something similar, and provide the Ogg version to FF3.1 users, and Flash to everyone else.
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Informative)
Youtube's business model (such as it is) revolves around keeping you coming back to their site to watch the videos
And Firefox relies on the power of customization to offer add ons such as Video Download Helper [mozilla.org] which allows you to download media on a page with two clicks. I find excellent for saving hard to find music videos on YouTube, reminds me what DVDs to look for when I visit my local independently owned record shop [buymusichere.net].
Re:what are the technical probs with Theora? (Score:2, Informative)
No FUD. (Score:5, Informative)
The HTML5 spec originally specified that, as a baseline, conforming implementations should include a minimum of Vorbis and Theora.
This would mean that web developers would have a reasonable baseline they could target that would work for all users, but still offer up 'higher quality' versions in more efficient alternative formats if the user had the right software.
Sadly, some of the MPEG video patent holders have big voices in the W3C and demanded that there be no baseline. (What a shock: they don't want to have have a more level compatibility playing field because they don't want to have to compete on quality and price).
W3C pulled the baseline due to those demands... but at least they didn't mandate useless or proprietary codecs.
No one proprietary format can gain universal adoption because some companies are always going to push their own, which is why we have this morass of incompatibility... FLV, WMV, Real, ugh. Apple pay Microsoft for a video format? Not if they can help it!
Companies like Apple are perfectly happy having their own walled gardens of incompatible formats since they've made quite a business out of it. The lack of a good standard suits them just fine.
So... providing good working web video becomes a numbers game and it's all up to us users to set things straight by making good choices, which is why this is such big news. Internet standards... protocols, formats, etc. should belong to the public. Anything less will make us perpetual victims to fighting between big companies and leave us subject to constant taxes on our internet use.
Opera had it first (as always) (Score:4, Informative)
I really don't want to sound fanboyish, but, Opera implemented the attribute (though only for Windows at the time) at 8th November 2007 [opera.com] and it added the Mac and Linux builds at 18th July 2008 [opera.com].
But, as always, it didn't got the respectable place in /.'s front page.
I am also dissapointed in the fact that Wikipedia didn't even say a single word about Opera supporting the same spec. as Firefox even earlier than Firefox.
Yes, I do know they support free (as in free speech) software so they recommended Firefox, but not saying a single word about Opera makes me (and Opera's devs) cry.
Re:Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:5, Informative)
The script is here [udel.edu]
Re:what are the technical probs with Theora? (Score:4, Informative)
You are aware that article is from over 2 1/2 years ago and theora's development did not stop dead at that point, right?
More recent developments [mit.edu] seem quite promising.
Re:YouTube (Score:1, Informative)
Actually, YouTube have provided feedback to the HTML 5 video element specification (and that feedback has led to spec changes):
Re:Ahh.. the fairness of slashdot. (Score:3, Informative)
The bitstream format is fixed, so encoder and decoder can be (and are) improved independently.
Opera video support (Score:2, Informative)
Opera has been working on video tag support for some time, their test build (a version of Opera 9.52) was released two weeks ago.
Article: http://labs.opera.com/news/2008/07/18/ [opera.com]
Download links: http://labs.opera.com/downloads/ [opera.com]
Re:Opera had it first (as always) (Score:4, Informative)
Those are labs builds. Opera has no release build or planned release build (like this Firefox release) with the feature in.
Re:The truth is ... (Score:3, Informative)
because that VLC cannot be legally distributed in the USA and other places due to patents, not copyright. The "code" is free but the "problem" has a license that must be paid. Organizations with money at stake Wikimdeia, Mozilla, Ubuntu... can't cut corners on these things.
Re:YouTube (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Theora still lacks good creation software (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Theora quality; An exciting battle (Score:3, Informative)
Aac (Not acc) is covered by patents and to quote from wikipedia:
'However, a patent license is required for all manufacturers or developers of AAC codecs [9].'
(See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding#Licensing_and_patents [wikipedia.org])
Re:YouTube (Score:3, Informative)